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Re: LibreOffice puts searched text into the PRIMARY selection (Linux, X11)


From: Vincent Lefevre <vincent () vinc17 net>
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2025 04:24:27 +0100

On 2025-12-10 17:08:42 +0100, Marco Moock wrote:
Am 10.12.2025 um 12:35:17 Uhr schrieb Vincent Lefevre:

Under Linux X11, LibreOffice (Writer, Calc, Draw...) silently puts
searched text into the PRIMARY selection when a search is active and
its window gets the focus. This can yield such text to be disclosed
to web sites (when one clicks with the middle button in some form)
and to other applications using the same X server (without needing
any action from the user).

This behavior exists in various applications like browsers, when
focusing the address bar (I saw that in Pale Moon). Dunno if that is
related to the GTK toolkit.

The common behavior for applications is that text is only copied to
primary if it is actively selected.

Here, with LibreOffice, this is worse, because this occurs whenever
the LibreOffice window gets the focus.

As a comparison, with Atril, when I choose "Save As...", the file name
(without the extension) gets selected and the PRIMARY selection is
modified (it gets this selection), which is bad. But at least, when
I modify the PRIMARY selection by selecting something in another
application and the focus is given back to the "Save As..." window,
the PRIMARY selection is *not* modified (contrary to what happens
with LibreOffice).

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent () vinc17 net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Pascaline project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)


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